[PLUG] networking stumper

[Keith Morse]

On Tue, 8 Oct 2002 gilmanhunt at attbi.com wrote:

> The network statistics look like this: (ifconfig eth0)
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:00:94:AD:93:96  
>           inet addr:10.10.10.45  Bcast:10.10.10.255  
> Mask:255.255.255.0
>           EtherTalk Phase 2 addr:65280/53
>           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  
> Metric:1
>           RX packets:31584334 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 
> frame:0
>           TX packets:27420007 errors:90 dropped:0 overruns:0 
> carrier:180
>           collisions:0 
>           RX bytes:3049054126 (2907.8 Mb)  TX 
> bytes:1644590675 (1568.4 Mb)
> 
> I'm not that worried about the TX errors: the box has been up for 
> 76 days. Before I got this box switched to another network 
> segment, this number was ... excessive (on the scale of multiple 
> hundreds of collisions per hour).
> 
> --------------
> So the question I have today is ...
> Would replacing the card in the Mail server have a greater than 
> 50 percent chance of helping the problems with Mail and FTP- 
> or do you suppose there's another underlying reason for this? 
> 
> The card in my linux box seems to work well. Maybe I should 
> just swap cards temporarily?


Don't know the specific answer, but will offer this.  I've been 
configuring a replacement mail server just recently and was experiencing 
network outages of either painfully slow or out right dead.  When I 
finally got around to doing an ifconfig I noticed the RX errors.  Not 
many, but it would increment.  After too much troubleshooting I replaced 
the patch cable and that fixed the problem.  Overall I learned that RX 
errors are really hard on network performance and reliability.